Category: Reviews
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Edward Tufte’s iPhone
The following is in response to an interesting and thoughtful video and essay by Edward Tufte, posted on his blog/site, in which he argues, among other things, that many of the applications on the Apple iPhone do not adequately take advantage of the iPhone’s screen resolution and its compelling and easy-to-use zoomable UI paradigm. In…
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Doing Things vs. Getting Things Done
A quick thought for this fine Friday: Something about the term “Getting Things Done” always bugged me. Now I know what it is. It’s the passive voice. Instead of the indirect phrasing using the verb “to get”, maybe we really should simply say “Doing Things“. GTD isn’t about getting other people to do things —…
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Design Research is a Design Process
I have a tendency to be extremely skeptical about user research in the design process. This is mostly because so much of it is, IMHO, (a) fundamentally bad (e.g., employing sloppy research methods or hamfisted statistical analyses), (b) flatly dishonest (e.g., dressing unscientific research in pseudo-scientific drag in order to justify a desired result), and…
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How Deep is your Internet News?
In today’s Times, I read a story that included a fallacy that I’m pretty fed up of hearing: The accusation that web-based news and journalism is overly brief and shallow, that it caters too much to the short attention spans of ADD-addled youths, and that the web is ushering in a new era of crappy…
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Circular UIs are Fun
A few years ago I was invited by the Whitney Museum to contribute an artwork to their Artport site, their showcase of interactive artists. My contribution was “Concentric Empathy”, a work about the various sorts of non-human emergent intelligences we might have to confront in the coming century. I am showing it again here because…
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Challenge: If You Can’t Say Something Nice about OLPC…
The One Laptop Per Child is now appearing in people’s mailboxes. But I’m a little sour about all the unquestioning praise for the user interface design, which to me looks like a complete disaster. So I have a challenge for UX pundits and professionals who are also proud new owners of the XO: Say something…
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The 1/2-inch Headphone Cord (iPhone Ready!)
With winter’s cold coming, I wanted to figure out a way to use an extra pair of over-the-ear headphones with my iPhone without losing the ability to use the iPhone’s wonderful on-cord control doohickey (which allows you to pause, play, or skip tracks, as well as being a hands-free microphone and call controller). So I…